Israel to have partial laser defenses by next year

I'm truly surprised that lasers appear to be operational defenses against mortars, rockets, and UAVs. I had thought it would be too difficult to get enough energy from a laser to destroy a target.

But if it works, it's really a game-changer for air defense. In particular, each shot will be orders of magnitude cheaper than existing rocket-based defenses. I would think reliability would improve as well, since the laser can continuously track its target, rather than a single shot as with current defenses.

I wonder how effective countermeasures would be. If you put a mirror coating on a missile, will it reflect enough energy to make the laser ineffective?

I guess reasonable evolution for arrow system for gen 5 will be literally jewish space lasers

Some more info https://www.rafael.co.il/worlds/land/iron-beam/ and a promo video https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=RF6eHC4JBXA

They have been testing it at a lot at the beginning of the last year. I don’t see it on the official website, wikipedia claims the range to be 7.5km, I heard 10km somewhere earlier. So it’s an addition to Iron Dome, for which range under 10km become challenging. The cost of an intercept is allegedly under $100, which is very impressive. The entire project cost 1B ILS, roughly 260M USD and was done by a government owned company. They already presented a naval version. It’s very impressive.

There are some American companies working on this for counter uas(drone) like blue halo: https://bluehalo.com/product/locust-laser-weapon-system-lws/

They talk about it a lot at trade shows, and I know it’s a big focus for them. Others like Raytheon as well.

No idea if any of them work though.